review

They’re people, too, and often based in Paris.

I’m burning with envy. Here I’ve been plugging away of late in places like Oklahoma City and Scottsdale.Meanwhile, both Susan Mary Alsop and Kati Marton, heroines of two ostensibly different books, had a much better idea.

I happened to read Michael Connelly's first mystery, The Black Echo, when it was published twenty years ago. I've been a fan every since. His books are now bestsellers, but it's always a nice feeling to have discovered someone (or something) before everyone else did—even if one deserves no particular credit for it.

‘Because I wanted to be pretty again.’

The main reason I wanted to read Prime Time, which is Jane Fonda’s latest book—there have been others—about Jane Fonda, is because of its cover. On the right-hand side, next to a large color photograph of the actress, her lips painted the precise color of her sweater (tangerine) and her hair abundantly streaked, ’70s-style, are the following words, punched out, perhaps, in order of their importance to her:

Montaigne’s persistent search for meaning.

Reading an essay by Montaigne is like strolling through a labyrinthine flea market. You are likely to find all sorts of things there, except maybe logic, and you are likely to get, like the author, a bit lost. His essays, ruled only by curiosity, wander, wonder, sidestep, and circle, accumulate anecdotes, quotations, and conjectures as they go, but never arrive at a definite conclusion or offer an argument that might drop you off at one.

There is such a thing as media bias, and it’s not good for you.

In November 2005, the Quarterly Journal ofEconomics, published by Harvard University and regarded by academics as one of the four top scholarly journals on economics in America, published the results of a study conducted by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, and Jeffrey Milyo, then a public policy professor at the University of Chicago and now holder of an endowed chair in social sciences at the University of Missouri.